Today we got the Nutch integration finished, and about an hour ago I finished installing the new breadcrumb stuff, which appears to be working. I need to finish up the look of them but functionally they work.

The new breadcrumbs are ridiculously easy to use. Simply insert text like the following:

{{subof|parentpagename}}

And the page will become a subpage of the specified parent page.

You do need to use underscores instead of spaces in the name of the parent page (for example, to specify “Firefox 3 for developers” as the parent page, you have to do:
{{subof|Firefox_3_for_developers}}

Also, breadcrumbs only work in the main namespace in the wiki; you can’t use them in the User namespace. I’m looking into changing that but it’s not really useful to have them elsewhere in general anyway.

If you’d like to thump on the updated MDC, drop by and play with it. I hope we can roll it out in the next handful of days but that will need some folks to test to be sure we didn’t botch it all up.

A little information for the folks that work on the internationalized versions of MDC — the subof template will need to be adjusted for each language, since the language for which it generates breadcrumbs is coded into the template. It’s a simple change — just changing “:en:” in a few places to “:pl:” or whatever is appropriate for your version of the site.

When we throw the switch, we’ll be throwing out all the stuff in the test version’s database, so feel free to do whatever edits you’d like in order to be comfortable with the upgrade. I’ll be copying the new and revised templates into the real wiki’s database at that time.

Once we throw the switch, we can go back and switch over from the old to the new breadcrumb system in existing articles. It’s not incredibly urgent as the old breadcrumbs are still working. However, the new system doesn’t require special knowledge of the internals of the MediaWiki database, so it will be more resilient going forward.

I am trying to setup breadcrumb for my own site. I am having hard time to figure this out. I have downloaded required template and rdf extensions. It doesn’t seems to show the breadcrumb. Do you have some notes on how to get this up and running on generic MediaWiki installation?